Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

The Sodality of Setar jutted up into the sky with pointed spires and two large symmetrical domes across from each other on either side of the property. Fashioned of white bricks and red roofs, the building sat along the watercourse with small floating docks of its own.

“Why are we here?” Vaasa asked, arching her back so it didn’t rest upon Reid’s chest.

Sitting behind her and seeming smug for a man who’d slept without blankets, he shifted his weight in the horse’s saddle. “My end of our deal, Wild One.”

No guards hovered around them, no prying ears that could spin tales of their lies. The horse trotted through the wrought iron gates of the looming building, and Vaasa counted a total of nine towers with red spires of their own. Windows dotted each of the many levels and a bell tower sat at the center of the campus with a clock so large she could see the curving details of the arms. Archways lined the entire perimeter of the bottom level, through which Vaasa could make out the expanse of brightly colored gardens.

Once inside the iron gates, Reid fluidly dismounted from behind her. Looking down into his cocky golden eyes, Vaasa was tempted to steal the horse and leave him here. Every moment with him was a trial of her patience and control.

Still, she dismounted and handed him the reins, resigned to face whatever awaited inside of this sodality. Knowledge lived in these structures, and it was a lack of information that haunted Vaasa more than anything.

After handing off the horse to an acolyte wearing amethyst robes, she and Reid plunged down one of the arching tunnels and took an immediate left through double doors into a grand entry room. Cool air flittered over the back of her neck and Vaasa let out a small breath of relief. They ascended the steps upon a curving staircase that led to a mezzanine of white marble, lined by more filigreed ironwork.

And then six more staircases, because apparently the people in Icrurian sodalities all had legs of iron.

Reid didn’t look the least bit winded, but given his display yesterday on that boat, it wasn’t unexpected. He outmatched her physically, something she didn’t like to think about.

At the top of the stairs waited another hallway framed by the forest greens and burnt browns of the entryway floor. At the right end, three doors down, Reid opened the door without waiting for an invitation, dragging Vaasa through the threshold with him.

Black walls emptied into an enormous chamber covered in walnut bookshelves. Vaulted ceilings revealed one of the many spires of this building, the intricate iron filigree breathtaking from this lower angle. There had to be at least three floors to this room, giant ladders attached to each wall. The entire far side was glass panels, revealing the city and letting in enough light to glimmer off the mosaic floor of oranges, blues, and grays. Lanterns hung from the ceiling, carrying that same incandescent spark she’d seen at the Sodality of Una, next to vining plants that resembled waterfalls of green. On the far wall sat a daybed the size of a mattress.

Perched upon it was a stunning brunette girl, only a few years older than Vaasa, wearing amethyst robes that contrasted beautifully with her olive-toned skin, her hands clinging to the corners of a book. She looked up immediately at their entrance and her face split into a smile, revealing pearl-white teeth. Just as her book snapped closed, another woman came around one of the bookshelves.

Blond hair threaded with silver fell into the stranger’s face as she looked up, revealing wrinkle-kissed amber eyes. Smiling with the broadness of a sky, the older woman set down her enormous leather tome, her onyx robes swishing behind her. “You’re back,” she said with the same western accent as Reid, and then flicked her eyes to Vaasa.

The woman blinked twice like she didn’t believe what she saw.

“We are,” Reid said, finally moving away from Vaasa and crossing the room in four large steps. As he embraced the strange woman, who melted into his arms, Vaasa could have sworn she heard Reid mumble something.

The two made eye contact as the woman inspected him, hand grabbing at his jaw and looking him over, and then she gazed back at Vaasa.

“This is Melisina Le Torneau,” Reid said, turning to face Vaasa once more. “The high witch of Veragi.”

“The most powerful of us all,” the other woman, the one with brown hair, teased.

Another body rounded the bookshelf and stopped abruptly, almost dropping her clay mug. Salt-and-pepper hair framed her light brown, wrinkled face and her eyes resembled spilled coffee.

“Vaasalisa,” Melisina said, “this is Suma. I see you’ve already met Amalie.”

She hadn’t actually met anyone.

The young one—Amalie, apparently—bolted upright from the couch. “It’s so lovely to meet you, Consort.”

A pair of women walked through the door just then and straightened their backs in surprise. Both seemed to be in their fifth or sixth decade. One had long black braids and deep umber skin, dark eyes rimmed by purple cat-eye glasses; the other had pale white skin and hair so platinum it rivaled the floors downstairs. The one with purple glasses looked at the other and said, “We have company? We never have company.”

The other snorted a laugh.

“Hush,” Amalie said, and the women glanced at each other, then back at Amalie, and the platinum-haired woman stuck out her tongue.

Vaasa got the distinct impression no one told those two women what to do and walked away with their heads intact. Especially when Reid gave a chuckle and returned to her, his proximity now itching down her side.

“Don’t worry about them,” Melisina said, then leaned a little closer. “Trouble, if you ask me.”

“No one did,” one of them sang, her purple glasses falling down her nose as she breezed past them all to the daybed Amalie had been sitting on. Instantly, Amalie protested, but the woman swished her voluptuous hips down into the spot and kicked up her legs. After she propped open her book, the world no longer existed to her.

“She’s an asshole,” the other said before going over to that very daybed and tossing herself onto it, too. The two women giggled, then went silent as they each began to read their own books.

Vaasa took a step back. Who the hell were these people?

“You’re Veragi?” Suma asked, brown eyes trailing up and down Vaasa as if she didn’t entirely believe her.

“I—” Vaasa stopped, fear striking her stomach and cramping. “I am not anything. It’s a curse, it’s—”

“Show us,” Melisina said.

Fingers shaking, Vaasa raised her wrist. With a little indulgence in the nasty emotions forever coiled in her gut, the pressure moved into her palm. Into her fingers. Dancing on the tips, black mist sputtered into existence and twirled playfully about her skin. A void , the stolen leather tome had described it.

Amalie caught a small breath, and, much to Vaasa’s dismay, Melisina smiled as if Vaasa had shown her the sun.

The sight of it made Vaasa sick, and she shook her fingers before shoving them into the pockets of her tan breeches. She looked at the floor.

“You’re afraid of it,” Melisina said.

Words caught in her throat, and Vaasa’s eyes darted to Reid. He was already looking at her, assessing. She swore it was disdain that now laced the way he gazed at her. Regardless, Reid gestured her on.

“I…,” Vaasa started, then snapped her lips shut.

She couldn’t. Reid probably saw exactly what she did—this evil had made a home inside of her, and it leaked into her expressions and onto her tongue.

He probably thought it had chosen wisely.

He didn’t need to know anything real about her—how she’d found her mother, how she had felt the awful invasion of this force in her stomach and her chest. The way it ruthlessly stole her breath, crashed down on her like a wave.

How it was strangling her from the inside out.

She could not give him another ounce of ammunition against her.

Throat increasingly tighter, magic increasingly heavier, Vaasa shook her head.

“Leave,” Melisina said suddenly.

Of course. Nodding in resignation, Vaasa looked up.

To find Melisina looking squarely at Reid.

He started to argue, but Melisina gave one good shake of her head. “She will not speak with you in the room, so you must go.”

“She is my wife. I need to know if—”

“And you will be a widower in a matter of months if she will not speak,” one of the women on the couch said, slamming her book shut and standing. The other joined her. “You can walk us to our classrooms.”

Something in Reid’s jaw ticked, and he glanced at Vaasa. Softened, even if just for a moment. “I’ll be waiting downstairs.”

“You will come back in five hours,” Melisina said with a wave to brush him off. “Surely you have more important things to do than supervise us. You’re a foreman, for goddess’s sake.”

Vaasa… might like this woman? Especially when Melisina walked to the door herself and swung it open.

Grumbling, yet entirely outmatched, Reid of Mireh stomped out of the room.

The two women winked, then scampered after him. Amalie giggled like wind chimes and Suma just walked away as if she was bored of the whole thing.

Vaasa might have gawked, had she not wanted to puke from nervousness. “We… we need five hours?”

“No,” Melisina said. “I just assume you haven’t had a moment to yourself since Dihrah.”

Vaasa’s brows slammed together. How did this woman know she’d been in Dihrah?

She watched as Melisina clicked the door shut and began to walk back to her table, unfazed by the slight anger she’d just drawn from her foreman. “Has the vomiting begun?”

Vaasa’s lips parted in shock.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” She gestured to the seat across from her as she picked up her black robes and settled into her chair. Vaasa took the seat and tried to appear comfortable. She wasn’t.

Amalie helped herself to a seat at the table, too. Unafraid, this one. “What do you like to be called? Sometimes Melisina calls you Vaasalisa, other times it’s Vaasa.”

Melisina had talked about her? To these women?

“Vaasa is fine. Are you both sages here?”

“Melisina is,” Amalie said with pride laced in her tone. “I will be one day. But more important, we are Veragi witches.”

Brow threading, Vaasa looked to Melisina for answers.

“Veragi are best in groups,” Melisina said. “All covens are.”

“One witch is trouble,” Amalie said.

“A coven is a nightmare,” Melisina added.

Vaasa awkwardly shifted her weight, the wooden chair beneath her groaning. Motherly bonds often put her off, and that was the only way to describe what flowed between her two tablemates. Despite the pulsing instinct she felt to hide or run, Vaasa also craved the approval of at least one person. She needed answers; she couldn’t ruin this. “I don’t understand.”

“Each sodality in Icruria houses one particular coven,” Melisina explained. “A place to study safely, to contribute to the literature and research surrounding magic, and to be a home for witches who don’t have one. Ours takes its name from Veragi, the goddess whose magic pulses through your veins.”

“We are lucky to have found you,” Amalie said. “So few bloodlines still exist with a connection to Veragi.”

Turning to Melisina, Vaasa raised her eyebrows. “Bloodlines?”

“What do you know of Veragi magic?” Melisina asked, lifting a hand to Amalie as if to ask her to be quiet.

Nothing. Nothing real, at least. “I…” It had been so long since Vaasa had been like this—unable to speak. She had often chosen not to, had waited for the opportune moment to let the perfect sentence roll off her tongue, but for the words simply not to be there? She felt the intimate caress of vulnerability and wanted to pry it from her nerves. “I know nothing. All I know is that it infected me when…” She looked down at the walnut table. Swallowed.

Silence remained in the room, as if Melisina and Amalie were simply waiting for Vaasa to decide she was ready to speak. It wasn’t pressure she felt, just the neutrality of two choices: Speak and find out, don’t and learn nothing.

“It infected me when I found my mother’s body,” Vaasa finally said.

Amalie’s mouth curved into a frown. Melisina shook her head, a small tsk rolling from her lips. “It did not infect you. Veragi magic is generational, passed down from a mother to her eldest daughter. It only passes upon the witch’s death.”

Vaasa’s heart skipped, her chest constricted, and something about it made her want to double over. To cry. “What?”

“It would have passed almost instantly. I’m so sorry.”

Vaasa dug her nails into her palm, angry with herself for not being as sad as Melisina wanted her to be. Instead, her confusion melded with resentment. “She… she always had this?”

“After her mother died, yes.”

“No.”

Melisina frowned. “I cannot change what is.”

Then… had her mother known this would happen to her? Had she been through it herself, yet denied Vaasa the knowledge? Had she condemned Vaasa to death? The cruelty of her family really knew no bounds.

“My mother was a witch ?”

Melisina nodded. “The very same as me. As you.”

“As all of us in this coven,” Amalie added.

“Who even was she, then?” Vaasa asked. “She was born in Asterya, she married an emperor—”

“That’s a big question,” Melisina said without a raise or dip in her tone. “Let’s focus on what is possible.”

Something about the words silenced the voices in Vaasa’s head. What could be more important than the answers she had spent months searching for? Than the opportunity to leave this place and start somewhere new?

Melisina rested her palms against the table. “Sometimes, the world is too big and the questions too difficult for any one person to face. Focus on what you know with certainty. What do you know right now?”

By the look on Melisina’s face, Vaasa wondered if she wanted to know the answers at all. If maybe a revelation like that might be the thing that finally broke her. “I want it to stop,” she replied.

“It will not do that. The magic is a part of you, just like any organ or blood.”

Bile crawled into Vaasa’s throat, burning at the back of her teeth. The implications of it… She couldn’t look at either of them. “Then I want to know how to turn it off when I need.”

“Fine. Today, you will learn to move the magic by sheer force of will.”

Could this magic even be willed? What was it made of, and why had it chosen her? Vaasa had a hundred more questions, each one stinging in her stomach and at her fingertips—

Focus on what is possible.

“You… you’re going to teach me how to use it?” Vaasa croaked.

Grinning, Melisina said, “If you let us, we can teach you far more than that.”

Five hours later, for the first time in months, Vaasa felt empty.

A good sort of empty. Not the aching, lonely, everything-hurts sort of drained, but rather the constant coil of anguish and upset had disappeared from her gut. Perhaps it was still there, but it was muted enough to feel dormant.

None of the women asked any further questions—they didn’t prod, poke, or search for answers that Vaasa didn’t have. Leaving the subject entirely alone, Vaasa had freed herself of the aching vulnerability and found a sliver of success.

Melisina and Amalie had been the only two who’d spent time with her, and as much as Vaasa didn’t understand it, she’d come to respect both of them. Amalie was wickedly smart and compassionate, and clearly a hard worker. It was she who taught Vaasa how to direct her magic: back and forth, over and under, she could guide where the feeling went in her gut.

The magic still felt wily and resistant, yet when she accepted and focused on it, rather than trying to tamp it down, it would snake up her wrists or between her fingers. The sight of it still turned her stomach, though. But despite the impending sickness, the exhaustion pounding against her temples, it felt good to be this tired. To have done something worth doing.

When not working on controlling Vaasa’s magic, the three women spoke about nothing important. For an hour, they’d left her to a book on the history of Veragi magic and its many uses. In that book, she’d gleaned what the stolen tome had meant by a void . The magic was exactly that—a force of raw power, one that smothered air and light and sound. Smothered any sense at all.

The coven’s tower, which housed the witches’ quarters, was filled with the sorts of books Vaasa had been searching Dihrah for, and she wondered if it was the same there. Were all the books on magic hidden away in the witches’ quarters at the Library of Una, too? Had that been what Brielle meant?

For their final hour, Amalie had given Vaasa something unrelated to Veragi magic. Something simply to enjoy, to ease the weight of heavy things, and the girl’s face had lit up at the thought of recommending something worth reading. Much to Vaasa’s surprise, she found herself falling into easy conversation with Amalie. She had never been around women her age before, at least not for long. It was unnerving and somehow special, which only raised Vaasa’s guard.

Upon leaving, they’d asked her to identify three things she was grateful for. It may have been one of the hardest things she’d done that day, and admitting that to herself bothered her.

She said the blanket she’d had last night, the cool temperature of the sodality, and the color green. Their names were the first things to pop into her head, but she couldn’t manage to speak those out loud.

Still, those hours were the first she’d had of complete calm, and it took every ounce of her willpower to leave the sodality.

Couldn’t she just sleep here?

“The fact that you have held on to this magic for so long is a testament to your power,” Melisina said as she walked Vaasa back downstairs. “You have acknowledged it today. The pain should ease, at least for a little while. If it comes back, don’t be afraid to sit in that discomfort. The magic isn’t inherently bad. But if it feels out of control, do not let it take over you. In violence, you will lose your air.”

While the thought of this senseless void suffocating her did nothing good for her nerves, to hear someone else mention the splintering agony, to have it simply validated, seemed to shift everything for Vaasa. It was the first time they had discussed how Vaasa had been holding this magic inside of herself without an outlet.

But to sit with it? She didn’t think herself capable of that.

“Tomorrow, same time?” Melisina asked.

“I… I don’t know how to thank you.”

Melisina raised her hand. “There is no need for thanks. Tomorrow, same time.”

This time, it wasn’t a question.

Something brilliant began to simmer inside of Vaasa as she descended the marble staircase that would lead her back to the first floor of their secluded tower.

Perhaps it was pride.

The fleeting happiness drained from her when she hit the bottom and found Reid standing there. He waited patiently for her with his body halfway turned and eyes on the horizon through the panels of windows. His hair was pulled back, much like it always was, but tonight he wasn’t dressed in the ceremonial garb Vaasa had grown accustomed to in the past few days. Instead, he wore dark pants with no shirt at all, though a brown drape slashed across one shoulder and over his chest. A lightweight cloak covered the other shoulder, falling to the center of his calves. Bands circled his formidable arms, and over one, he’d draped a bundle of fabric. Extra clothing. The moment he saw her, he took that fabric within his hand. “You’re alive.”

“Yes, well, they’re much better company. Didn’t feel the need to jump out of any windows this time.”

Reid tipped his head back and laughed. “Gods, my conversations were infinitely more boring without you, Wild One.”

How did he manage to pick at each and every one of her nerves? Peering at the witches who now descended the stairs, Vaasa stepped forward as if his proximity didn’t bother her. “Can we go?”

Looking back to her, he confessed, “They know. You don’t need to pretend here.”

Her lips parted, and a bit of humiliation sparked within her. Taking a small step back, she nodded.

“Will you allow me to show you Mireh tonight?” he asked.

Show her Mireh? “What do you mean?”

“The Lower Garden comes alive at night. I’d like to show you off. I’ve waited months to do so.”

Would this be their life, then? Putting on a show whenever he requested it of her?

It was exactly what she’d signed up for, actually. Reid probably needed to convince his people first that their union was real and his relationship with Asterya was assured. She looked down at herself and said, “Are those clothes for me?” Her tan breeches and now-dingy white blouse wouldn’t be how he wanted his consort to appear to the rest of the world.

“They are,” he confirmed, gesturing for her to go and change.

Sighing, Vaasa swiped the clothing out of his hands and marched to the left side of the first floor, cursing under her breath as Amalie watched her. Quickly, she ducked into the attached bathing chamber and changed, tugging her fingers through her hair and growling another curse at the clothing he’d chosen.

Breezy, olive-colored breeches and a sleeveless white top, one made of tight material that came all the way to her neck. She furrowed her brow. It hardly covered her torso. It was never warm enough in Mek?s to wear anything this thin, or with her midriff showing, let alone without sleeves. To her luck, he’d included a cloak.

Amalie’s jaw dropped as Vaasa ducked out of the bathing chamber and she stood next to Reid, who was exchanging words again with Melisina. Both turned to look at her at once, and Reid straightened his back.

“You’re actually wearing them.”

“Was I not supposed to?”

“Well, yes.” He scrubbed at his jaw. “I just thought you’d put up a fight first.”

“I’m sure I can find something for us to fight about, if you’d like.”

The right corner of his lips turned up, a crooked half smile, and he said, “I think I like you agreeable.”

“Don’t push your luck,” she muttered, bidding the witches goodbye once more.

She tried to ignore her irritation at his laughter as he followed her.

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Wild One,” he said as he guided her through the door.